This invention relates to the delivery of injected fuel pulses to the combustion chambers of an internal combustion engine and particularly to the sensing and indication of the quantity of injected fuel per pulse during engine operation. In addition to being useful for engine calibration purposes, such information can be used in a feedback control system to control the actual fuel delivery to an engine during vehicle mounted engine operation. Although useful for spark ignited engines, this invention was conceived and is basically designed for diesel engines, where quantity of injected fuel has, in the prior art, generally been in direct response to operator demand, with perhaps a simple limiting arrangement to reduce smoke during high load operation.
Although fuel quantity measurement systems are not unknown in the prior art, such systems generally take the form of cumbersome laboratory test equipment which is not at all suitable for real time operation on a vehicle. A typical system of this type provides for the insertion of some apparatus in a fuel line of the engine, the operation of the engine under constant conditions for a predetermined number of fuel pulses, the diversion of the fuel in the aforesaid fuel line to a collection device and the subsequent manual measurement of the amount of fuel delivered to said collection device.